Afrekete: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Writing

It is hard to think of a more excluded minority group than the one represented by the 19 Black Lesbian writers whose pieces constitute this anthology. It is equally hard to find any group of literary personalities who can match the resilience, talent, individuality, and personal dignity of the

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people, actual or fictional, whom we meet in this first-of-a-kind volume of short stories, essays, and poems.

The introduction tells us that the editors, Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce Delaney, spread word of their project “largely through informal networks” across the English-speaking world, and received over two hundred submissions from which to pick. Their selections include works by “new and emerging writers…as well as prominent authors”, and embody “diverging aesthetics, experiences, and social and political positions” presented in “a range of styles”. Yet even with this rich variety Afrekete possesses a unity and coherence that go beyond the commitment to Black Lesbian writing of quality to give us that rare kind of compendium: an anthology that holds together as an artistic whole.

The magnetic core ordering and arranging the iron filings that are these pieces is the transmutation of acute suffering and loss into genuine personal nobility, and the agent effecting this transmutation is “the impulse to love”, to borrow a phrase from Alexis De Veaux’s “Dear Aunt Nanadine”. Or, as Carolivia Herron’s “The Old Lady” puts it after reciting a litany of lost loves:

“I do love,” said the old lady, the old black lady sitting with her cup of tea by dusk, quiet by darkening light spiraling above her head, “Or at least I want…, at least I try…, at least I walk toward love in the way that I can,” said the old lady, the old black lady, who walks every day by the sea in Gloucester with her African hair and her Moses staff; the old lady, the old black lady, for whom even now the winter comes on that brings no spring.

Inevitably, this resembles the classical pattern of tragedy, for there is a great deal of suffering of every variety in these pieces: a young girl’s loss of a revered older brother to the Vietnam war, ostracism by a nurturing family because of an interracial Lesbian affair; loss of a cherished and inspiring mentor, rape, abortion, loss of life to AIDS, it is all there. The ensuing suffering is depicted in as many ways as there are personalities: from the gentle, whispering understatement of the above passage to the terrifyingly brutal depiction of unbelievable abuse in Cynthia Bond’s “Ruby.” Yet there is never a descent into self-pity, never a loss of self-respect: suffering is always acknowledged and confronted with courage and dignity, and in each case, loss is redeemed by “the impulse to love”.

Notwithstanding the gravity of such themes, the volume does not lack humor, for can there be true love without it? The collection opens and closes with pieces by Audre Lorde, the pioneer of Black Lesbian writing, and it is fitting to echo the editors’ tribute to her by quoting this exquisite passage of self-mocking, erotic humor. She is describing a dish presented at a Lesbian party in “Tar Beach” a chapter from her autobiographical Zami:

But the centerpiece of the whole table was a huge platter of succulent and thinly sliced roast beef, set into an underpan of cracked ice. Upon the beige platter, each slice of rare meat had been lovingly laid out and individually folded up into a vulval pattern, with a tiny dab of mayonnaise at the crucial apex. The pink-brown folded meat around the pale cream-yellow dot formed suggestive sculptures that made a great hot with all the women present, and Pet, at whose house the party was being given and whose idea the meat sculptures were, smilingly acknowledged the many compliments on her platter with a long-necked graceful nod of her elegant dancer’s head.

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